July 6, 2010

BIOSHOCK FILM WILL BE EXPENSIVE AND R-RATED BUT NOTHING CONFIRMS

Ever wonder what happen to the film BioShock, a planned movie project based on the game popularly developed by Irrational Game and 2K Marin. The plan of taking the 2007 game into big screen began since last year with Gore Verbinski directing and scheduled for this year's release. No, apparently those did not happen. The last thing we heard about the movie were that the production has been hold due to budgetary concerns and Gore Verbinski vacating the director seat for another project commitment. Gore Verbinski went on to direct an animated feature Rango while Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is replacing him on the job.

Recently, there are some news resurfacing about the movie and the people in IGN managed to grab Verbinski for somedetails about the BioShock big screen adaptation he's producing for Universal. The movie has been put on stalled in the recent months due to budgetary concern but remain optimist that it will happen. He said:

We’re working trying to make it. The problem with BioShock was: R-rated movie, underwater, horror. It’s a really expensive R-rated movie… So we’re trying to figure out a way working with [director] Juan Carlos [Fresnadillo] to get the budget down and still keep so it’s true to the core audience, you know? The thing is it has to be R, a hard R.

What does that tell you? Big budget plus game adaptation plus an R-rated formula is a risky business. Just look at Prince Of Persia, a popular game even with a tamer PG-13 rating still got stumbled in the box office for nothing. That piece of dragger story made with a price tag of $200 million and till today is still making all the money back. But it is not to say that we are sure that BioShock will follow that kind of trend. Getting off BioShock to work is difficult because big budget of over $100 million is always a risky thing to do these days while game adaptation genre has not been performing well with the audience. Also, an R-rating will also narrow down the audience scope, leaving a lot of teenagers out.

Did the recent performance of Prince of Persia affectd the plans for BioShock? Here's what Verbinski has to say:

No, I think BioShock’s a rare one because it’s actually a great story… Me? I don’t want to make movies based on videogames, but BioShock’s the one Oedipal, crazy kind of — it’s just got really good bones, and we’re really trying to figure out a way to make it work… We don’t want to dumb it down, we don’t want to make it PG-13. We want to keep it really edgy, and it’s a huge bill.

At least fans can rest assured that things won't go trimmed down and Verbinski insisted on maintaining the more adult-nature and horror for the movie. Unfortunately, if BioShock ended up in the backyard and not been able to make, I won't be surprise at all. Look at how Halo ended up. Even with Peter Jackson and director Neill Blomkamp were able to produce some amazing conceptual arts and story, the project is basically dead on the water. I do hope BioShock will be made...someday.